Hilary Miller

Its been a little quiet round these parts over the past month, as the daily juggle between motherhood, work and blogging usually ends in me dropping the blogging ball.Â I do have a couple of posts in the works, but in the meantime here’s a few tidbits from the past week in the genomics world [...]

Iâ€™m not talking about any big bird, but THE Big Bird, the one who hangs out on Sesame Street. Mike Dickison, zoologist and information design specialist in Christchurch, gave this talk at a recent pecha-kucha event (a pecha-kucha is a talk in which 20 slides play for exactly 20 seconds each, and the speaker tries [...]

I just came across this quote from Marie Curie on Christie Wilcox’s blog, Observations of a Nerd, which I thought followed on quite nicely from the recent TED talk I posted about on the benefits of exploratory research. “We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful [...]

On more than one occasion I’ve been asked what the commercial applications of my research are, usually by people who have no background in science themselves. When I tell them I do basic research in evolutionary genetics that doesn’t have any commercial applicationÂ there often follows outrage that the government actually gives out money toÂ pursueÂ this research [...]

In 1987, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and the late Allan Wilson published a paper in Nature showing that all human females can trace their lineage back to a single maternal ancestor (“mitochondrial Eve“) located in Africa. Â In Plos Genetics this week there is an interesting interview with Rebecca Cann, where she talks about her own [...]

In 2007, an Alaskan bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica baueri) flew 11,000 kms over 8 days from Siberia to New Zealand. Â Nonstop. Â Thats without feeding, sitting down on the ocean to rest, or calling in for a break at a tropical island on the way. Â In Plos Biology this week, Anders HedenstrÃ¶m looks at the physiological [...]

While we’re on the subject of extinct species, Prof Kevin Campbell and colleagues in Canada and Australia have reported resurrecting mammoth hemoglobin in a paper out this week in Nature Genetics.Â This won’t help at all with cloning a mammoth, but provides a fascinatingÂ insight into mammoth physiology and evolution. Hemoglobin is the protein whichÂ transports oxygen [...]

TED.com is one of my favourite websites – every week they have fantastic new talks from “the worlds most fascinating thinkers and doers”.Â This weeks highlight is this talk from Sebastian Wernicke, where he does the stats on what makes the “most favorited” TED talks, and comes up with how to construct the ultimate TED [...]

Â Fancy seeing herds of mammoths running across the tundra, moa crashing through the undergrowth, or perhaps a tasmanian tiger lurking in the Aussie bush? Well in the near future these images might not just be the stuff of far-fetched Hollywood movie plots.Â Advances in molecular biology and genomics mean that the ability to clone extinct [...]

Here’s one from the good news but bad news file:Â The good news is that a Duvaucel’s gecko (Hoplodactylus duvaucelii) has been found on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in nearly 100 years.Â The bad news is that it was found dead in a mouse trap. Duvaucels geckos are the largest of [...]

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